One of the more common questions I get asked is “Can I join your faction”. And second to that “Should I stay in this faction”.

For new players having a group of players around you to give advice is the only likely benefit of being in a faction. With low stats and wealth the only factions you are invited to will have no bonuses, and really that’s all they are worth until War 2.0 is out.

So what are the bonuses?

Steadfast: Each upgrade gives a 1% increase to gym gain

Hermetic: Each upgrade decreases drug addiction gains by 5%

Adept: Each upgrade decreases Education course times by 2.5%

Pertinent: Each upgrade increases busting skill by 10%

Salutary: Each upgrade decreases revive cost by 5 energy

Gallant: Each upgrade increases nerve bar by 1 nerve

Cumber: Each upgrade increases travel item carriage by one

Enormity: Each upgrade increases crime skill

Vigor: Each upgrade reduces hospital time

Chaining: Each upgrades adds 30 seconds to your chain time

Obviously the most sought after is the Steadfast bonus – and remember until you hit 50m in a stat your steadfast bonus will really help speed up stat gains.

Then Hermetic for the Xanax abusers. This one can save you millions and billions as you go on.

After that the crime bonuses Gallant and Enormity can get you going with some OCs and increasing your nerve bar. Pertinent will be a slight benefit there, but if you are going to go on a busting spree join a Law Firm first.

Salutary is handy for getting the 1000 revives merit, but really unless that is your make-a-fortune plan it’s got no place in a warring faction.

Adept – great for new players. Get your educations done ASAP to get the gym gains, combat experience, medical boosters and then the other benefits you may want. But again no place in a warring faction.

Finally Vigor and Chaining.. the two worst upgrades possible. I won’t go in to it too much – read about chaining strategy here. But there is no reason to want slower chain cooldowns or have your members out of hospital quicker.

How do you find a faction?

The better factions are constantly trying to recruit heavy hitters and fast chainers, so if you have either of those you won’t have an issue finding a faction.

Otherwise you have to look for a faction which is made up of lower levels and you will often have to chain with a lot of your energy to “pay your way”. This is why I don’t recommend factions to newer players – your energy is worth a lot to you. You should be looking to increase your stats or wealth way before you think about warring. I would say get to 200m stat total, or 10b wealth, before starting to war.

So finally.. a new release! The missions addition has certainly caused a bit of a stir, but a lot of people have been left asking ‘whats the point’

The missions range from attacking abroad, sending dodgy parcels through to gambling in the casino – and the rewards are pretty low so far ($20k is the most I’ve seen), which for the amount of energy used is far too low for most players to make a living from. So how can we make the most of this new missions system?

1. Don’t waste your time/energy

New missions appear daily, and you can have up to three not yet started at any time. So it pays to wait, have 2-3 missions ready and accept them all at the same time. If you get three attacking missions you might find you complete all three contracts with a single attack. For example one mission has you mug a specific person, another has you mug $1m, and another is to finish an attack with just your fists. Mugging that specific person with just your fists has saved you 25e, and if your lucky they may even give you the $1m in muggings too.

Another reason to wait is the way that new missions pick targets out. Quite often if I go to start a mission just as it has become available someone else has already hosped my target – they also had a mission with this players name, but not always is it the same mission. If you wait 12 hours you might find that you are now the only one with that target on your mission list.

2. Don’t waste your mission credits

The mission credits you earn can be spent on a variety of ‘prizes’, Most of which can be obtained from the item market. This is where you need to be savvy in what you spend these credits on – there is special ammunition available here that you can’t get anywhere else. So unless you see an RPG pop up for 1 point then store your mission credits and check your available mission prizes often. If you always use one type of ammo, only spend them on that type of ammo. You might find one day that ammo will give you the edge in an important battle.

3. Use the missions to trade

If you get a mission which involves using a specific weapon or item you will find that others will also be getting that mission. If you get in early you may be able to buy a bunch of that item cheap, and make a quick profit as other people buy them for the same mission.

4. Travel shouldn’t be wasted

Several missions involve travelling to a different country to mug/hosp someone inactive. But don’t forget to pick up some items while you are there – Plushies and Flowers should be the minimum, but in SA you can grab cheap xanax and combat gear most of the time as well.

So often I get new players asking me for money or tips. I wish I had time to give people personal tips, and wish even more I was rich enough to give everyone money. But I don’t and I am not.

I do however have a standard plan for new players to go from $100 to $500m and earn enough daily to cover points, drugs and further income. It will cost you time and energy (both game and real life) but you won’t need to buy DPs or risk much.

Step 1: Slut for someone (5 days)So the first step is to build some funds. You should be able to ‘attack and lose’ to someone for about $200,000 per loss. There is a caveat here, some people in the forums are scammers and won’t pay you. Check the networth of the person offering, and if possible get meds off them before you make your losses.

You want to aim for 20m, which is 100 losses. You want to try and buy items that sell quickly and have a stable price to hide the money you make as you get it. If you watch the point market you can prepate for step 2 during this time too.

Step 2: Point trade (5-20 days)Now you have a small fund you can trade points. The points market is a funny one, there are flower/plushie “traders” who sell points all day in big batches (500+), “bankers” who buy lots of points to hide money, “users” who want to just buy points to use for refills, then “skimmers” (like we will be) who buy big batches at low prices, and sell in smaller batches at higher prices.

The aim here is to have a high volume of points traded. You should be able to buy 200-250 point batches and then list 25/50/100 at 200-500$ more than you bought. thats $40,000 profit for every batch you buy minimum and up to $100k. 250 points normally sell every 30 minutes. As a test I listed 25 at 00:53 at about $400 more per point than I bought a batch of 100 points at, they sold at 00:57, that is 4 minutes. If I had more listings I may have sold 150 points in that time.

You are aiming here for at least $2m a day, and you will be capped at about $5m a day. Three weeks of this and you can skip steps 3&4

Step 3: Item Trade quickly (10-15 days+)You can now start buying some of the quicker moving items, Xanax, Meds and Flower/Plushies, so if you haven’t already buy a bazaar (250 points from point building).

These sell more slowly, but the profit margins are similar and you have to do less work. You need to start by checking the prices graphs of a few potential items and work out which one is currently low. You can either buy from someone else’s bazaar, or check trade chat to try and find deals on bulk items. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and always be wary of scams and buy-muggers.

You want to aim for 1% profit per item, and sell all your items you buy within 48 hours. At 0.5% a day it isn’t as much profit as you can make from points, but is more hands off and may suit your real life life-style better.

If you allow $20m for point trading, then you should have $30m you can item trade with at this point – As you start to build your wealth you will find you either have too much stock to sell, or too much money to hide. You now want to start concentrating on higher priced items. The higher the price the bigger the change in pricing, and the easier profit is. The best items for this are Cans, eDVDs and Supply packs. You want to aim for having as little as possible in cash available at any time – Money in your wallet is idle, and a mug risk.

Again if you have allowed $20m for points trading, you should now have $50m+ for items trading.

Step 4: Invest in Benefit BlocksYou should now be earning between $2-5m a day, and at some point all of the above will be making so much profit you can’t keep buying points and items. It’s now time to invest in some stocks, and if you want to be lazy the best way is benefit blocks.

Start with LSC, it’s cheap and pays roughly $900k a week in payouts, or ~1.8% a week. Then TCHS if the medical supplies price is 1% of the BB cost or more.

Eventually you will want PRN, SYM, EWM, SLAG and finally FHG. But before then you will probably want to finish step 5.

Step 5: BankingHopefully at this point you will have been earning merits and have built up quite a bit of value. Spending your merits on banking can be a good idea if you are intent on easily making the cash for drugs and points. You want to be banking any “spare” cash weekly, which allows you to be flexible with what you buy and means your interest starts to compound. One day when you have $2b (or $3b in 10* oil rig) it is best to bank for 2 months at a time. But right now stick with weekly and NEVER use the caymans.

In conjunction with step 4 you should be banking 100-400m a week, and buying your ‘next’ stock block as you go. If you have the time and patience to do steps 2+3 as well you could be earning $100m a week, $5.2b a year.